Uncountable times have I gone over to the 25th Street
flea market in the parking lot next to St. Sava’s church with the bust of
Nikola Tesla out front. I've always admired the particularly beautiful juxtaposition of
majestic and dissimilar buildings standing all around and behind
the old church, including the Empire State Building. Never in any of those moments
did I imagine what St. Sava’s might look like were it to catch fire, and last night
it did, spectacularly. The fire looked like dragons, and in a few hours the church
and all its quiet history was ruined.

One day last fall I went into the church after the flea
market. The doors were open and I sat in its dark mystery with the sunny day
outside. And in January when I passed it—whitened and still—during the big blizzard, I marveled at the way it looked in the snow and took a picture of it. Last night after finding out that St. Sava's had burned, I read about all of
the struggles to raise the money for its repairs over the years, and about
how its windows were blown out by anti communist terrorist bombs in the 1960s.
I felt astonished at that; that such a thing had happened and I had not heard
of it before. Which just reminded me of how little I really know about so much,
about so much that is right here all around me, on these streets that I walk in
all the time.

Today I had a doctor’s appointment downtown, and in the waiting
room I saw people with very dramatic things wrong with them. There was one particular man called
Petey who was completely stiff, like a light pole. He looked to be in his fifties
somewhere, accompanied by a woman probably in her sixties. She put her hand on
his back and called someone on her phone. “Hello?” She said. Then she said, “Hello,
Sal? I’m here with Petey. Yeah, that’s right, but I wantidda check up on you.
Here. Say hello to Petey.” She held out the phone and Petey leaned forward like
the fire hydrant in front of my building that has been broken and leaning for
weeks. Water is pooled in the base of the hydrant at the broken place, and
every time I see it I wonder if I should go around the corner to the firehouse
and let them know.

Petey spoke into the phone the woman was holding in front of
his face. “Hey pal,” he said. “How ya doin? Yeah, I’m in the doctor’s office.
You know I love you, right pal? You’re like a father to me.” The woman took the
phone back then and said into it: “Now Sal, I want you to eat everything that’s
on the plate for your lunch. And after you eat everything on the plate, then
you can go to the piano. A’right?”

The doctor called me in then. She was supposed to have my blood
test results but the mailroom was very slow, she said, so unfortunately she
didn’t have them yet. She told me a few things about the MRI scan I’d had, mostly
explaining how nerves in the spine can work or not work, very generally, it
seemed, and she told me how terrible my insurance is. I had the MRI at night on
a Sunday, and everything had felt eerie in the radiology department at such an
odd time. The MRI machine was very loud inside. Some of the sounds it made had
a sort of rhythmic, atonal monotony that made me feel as if I were trapped at a
John Cage performance. How boring I’ve always found John Cage to be, I thought,
lying there in the loud banging tube. How boring and tedious and
claustrophobic, as boring as an MRI.

Today I was given a note to take to the file department,
where they would make me a copy of the MRI reading. The file department was down in the basement, and the man and woman working there were much nicer than the
doctor. The man told me it would take some time to make the copy, so perhaps I might take a walk. I told him I would walk uptown to look at the
burned church, which both he and the woman had seen on the news. “Terrible,”
the woman said. “If it is arson,” said the man, “God will most certainly punish
whoever did it.”

I walked up Park Avenue to 25th Street and
westward. The police had put up barricades around the shell of poor St. Sava’s.
The street was full of quiet fire engines and in front of the ruined church I
could see the bust of Nikola Tesla, unharmed, his head turned the way it always
is to face Madison Park. The church looked like a war photograph. All that
stone and brick. How could it burn? People wondered aloud about candles, or
gasoline, if it had been done on purpose. Then there were people who walked
along in pairs, talking, passing the church and its blown out windows without so
much as a glance. A few feet away I saw Jack Hirschman, once the Poet Laureate of
San Francisco, speaking into a phone. He was describing the ruined roof and the
transparent quality of the shell. He turned and looked directly at me. “Jack,” I
said. But he shook his head. He smiled and waved a finger to tell me he wasn’t
Jack at all. “Someone else just mistook me for Jack Hirschman,” he said into
the phone.

The Empire State Building stood back at a distance, her head
full of mist, and never more somber. I walked back downtown. I thought of Sal,
whoever and wherever he was, on the other end of the phone in the doctor’s
office waiting room, the man for whom a piano waited, and I wondered if he had
eaten his lunch the way he was supposed to.

Oh Romy! So sad and so beautifully described. I'm welling up, honestly! You have such a remarkable way with words. Just a few, simple and unsentimental phrases capture the entire feeling of the situation.

Thank Romy.....there are so few antidotes to the monotony NY has become. Last nightt I read with 4 girls in their 20's and 30's, girls with book deals and who write for big magazines....all reading in this little back room in the EV...NY is a very strange place now but not for the reasons that made it strange before...more and more of those are gone....St Sava's , Nikola Tesla, people who look like people who are gone.....what did Marty Matz tell me? "I will be remembered as long as there are people who remember me , then i will be gone."

thank you romy... today was a strange day. walking around chinatown and little italy in the rain with a cold getting my new glasses after my old ones were knocked onto the train tracks...so i felt not quite "in" the day but somewhere around it. your writing centered me, as it always does cause even tho it was sad about the church, and weirdly true about John Cage and MRI's - what comes out of you is so real and down to earth that i can take a breath and reconnect. thanks for that.

Lovely. I love that church and bust of Tesla. This is so sad. So many beautiful churches are being razed or, ironically, turned into expensive condos for worshippers of the golden calf. It's hard to know where to turn first to stop the destruction of our world. Thanks for your observations and documentation.